Hasta La Gadget!

What’s the first thing you should do when you get the N8? Considering it packs the biggest image sensor embedded in a phone yet, Carl Zeiss optics, and an eight-digit pixel count, it seemed obvious to us that the answer was to take it on a picture- and video-taking stroll around London. On our way out we saw our iPhone 4 looking all sad and lonely, so we went ahead and brought it along as well. Below you shall find one gallery of pure, unadulterated N8 sample shots, another interspersed with the iPhone’s results for comparison’s sake, and a final one with side-by-side 100 percent crops from each image taker. Once you’ve digested all of those, we suggest hopping past the break and tucking into some tasty video comparisons for dessert.

Naturally, all the images are entirely unretouched (but for our masterly watermarking) and the iPhone 4’s HDR hocus pocus has been left off. We’ve also provided a zip file containing all the full-res imagery shot with the N8 in a link below.

A quick note is also merited about the N8’s resolution. The sensor’s display ratio is 4:3, which means that full 12 megapixel shots are only available in those dimensions. The camera software, however, defaults to shooting 9 megapixel snaps at the increasingly popular 16:9 ratio — this is done simply by cropping away the “excess” bars at the top and bottom of the image, meaning that the 9 megapixel images are giving us identical performance as the 12 megapixel ones, they’re just chopped down (from 4000 x 3000 to 4000 x 2248) for the sake of convenience. Now, on with the show!

Continue reading Nokia N8 vs. iPhone 4: camera showdown

Nokia N8 vs. iPhone 4: camera showdown originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thought film was dead? Far from it. In an interview with the British Journal of Photography, Kodak’s US marketing manager of pro film Scott DiSabato said that sales of color film are steady, and that black and white is “doing extremely well.” He sees it as a mini-revolution, adding that “it almost feels that there is a very real resurgence for film.”

And this strong market is letting Kodak release brand new emulsions. The updated Portra 400, which will be available in November, is described by DiSabato as “the best film Kodak has ever made.” Given Kodak’s history, that’s quite a claim. And that’s not even the biggest surprise. Portra 400 is not made for printing. It is designed to be scanned.

The new emulsion has very fine grain (using Kodak’s T-grain technology first seen in the 1980s) and has had its color saturation and contrast tweaked to better suit scanners. DiSabato and the Kodak techs realized that most film is scanned at some stage in a photographer’s workflow, so they made it scanner friendly. Contrast was lowered to better allow the scan to capture the full range of tones, and the color gamut “is not pumped up so much that it begins to compete with some of that tonal information.”

The stills team worked with the Kodak motion-picture team and borrowed some of this technology from the Vision3 line of films, also designed to be part of a digital workflow.

Kodak is also making small-batch films, in collaboration with Canham Cameras. Canham specializes in very large-format film – 11×14, 20×24 and “other goofy sizes.” Canham takes orders from all over the world until they have enough to make it economical for Kodak to tool up and manufacture it. Amazingly, Kodak is actually “moving in this direction,” say DiSabato.

Like vinyl before it, the death of film seems to have been greatly exaggerated. Hell, even the kids are getting into it. “Once they do get a hold of film in a university,” DiSabato says, “they just seem to fall in love with it.”

Kodak Portra 400 product page [Kodak]

Kodak:There is a very real resurgence for film [BJP]

See Also:

• Mama, They Took My Kodachrome Away
• Kodak Claims Film Sales Growing
• Polaroid Ends Instant Film Production

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Smartphones don’t have the best cameras in the world, but you can still take some really good shots with the right lighting and timing. Wired.com readers proved that in our recent iPhoneography contest, where we asked you to submit your best smartphone snaps.

You created, you submitted, you voted, and the crowd favorite was David Chen’s photo (above) shot in the banks of the Charles River in Boston, using his iPhone 3GS.  We agreed that’s pretty cool: Those people sure look like monkeys, don’t they? (Er, they are people, right?) Congrats, David! We’re featuring your photo for a week here at Wired.com.

Dozens of you submitted really neat photos, too, and clicking through this gallery, you can see 14 others who received the most votes, as well as some favorites handpicked by Wired.com. Enjoy.

See Also:

• Gallery: iPhone Photographers Celebrate Artsy Snaps
• Enter Wired’s Smartphone Photography Contest

Timur Civan is a director of photography for movies, and a photographer. He’s also a tinkerer, and he got his hands on an old Wollensak 35mm F5.0 Cine-Velostigmat, a hand cranked movie-camera lens from 1908. You see it above, wedded to his Canon 5D MkII. But where did it come from?

Civan got a call from his friend, known mysteriously only as “a Russian lens technician”:

He found in a box of random parts, hidden inside anther lens this gem. A circa 1908 (possibly earlier) 35mm lens. Still functioning, mostly brass, and not nearly as much dust or fungus as one would think after sitting in a box for over a hundred years. This lens is a piece of motion picture history, and at this point rare beyond words. So I say to him, “Wow… what do you have in mind?” he smiles, and says, (in the thickest Russian accent you can imagine) “I can make this fit EF you know…”

The results are astonishing. This century-old hunk of glass and brass makes a great picture. There’s vignetting at the edges, a softness and a lack of biting contrast. There’s also a color-shift in the non-black-and-white images. In short, the lens adds all the tweaks you might do in post-processing to Holga-fy your pictures. Civan is planning on shooting some footage with the lens, too, which is its purpose after all, and promises to share the results on the Cinema 5D forums, where he posted his photographs.

But aside from the great pictures, and the wonderful story of the mysterious Russian, we can learn something from this tale. Camera-tech comes and goes, but photography is really just about light. That’s why you should buy the best lenses you can afford. They will probably last longer than you.

102 year old lens on a 5DmkII [Cinema 5D forums]

Miquel Àngel García, head of Olympus Europe, has stated that his company will no longer make new Four Thirds lenses. In Japan, the smaller, mirrorless Micro Four Thirds cameras have already captured 40% of the market, and these cameras and their smaller lenses will be Olympus focus in future.

García spoke to Spanish site Quesabesde at this year’s Photokina show, and the whole interview is worth reading (it’s in Spanish, but Google’s translation is pretty good for once). While you will of course still be able to buy existing Four Thirds lenses, and Olympus hasn’t yet said it is giving up on Four Thirds bodies (like the brand-new E-5), it is clearly moving away from SLRs altogether. In fact, García thinks that interchangeable-lens compacts will break the Nikon-Canon duumvirate of the global camera market.

“But it is very important to have broken the DSLR market status quo” says García, “There are two brands that for years have been allocated 80% of the global market. And this will change.”

Olympus is, in some ways, like the Apple of the camera industry. Since the original half-frame Pen film camera, through the tiny SLRs it has made over the years and the Trip series of high-end compacts, Olympus has been an innovator. García mentions that his company was the first to add sensor-cleaning and live-view to its cameras. But Olympus is even more like Apple in its willingness to drop old technologies when it sees they are dying.

I have mentioned before that the SLR is destined to be a niche tool, something for professionals who need its flexibility, while the rest of us switch to mirrorless compacts. The commenters on that post vehemently disagreed, but it seems that at least one camera company thinks the same way.

No estamos desarrollando más ópticas Cuatro Tercios [Quesabesde]

See Also:

• Olympus EP-1 Pen Gaining Fans Daily
• Sony Fights Micro Four-Thirds With Lens-Changing Compact
• Cosina Joins Micro Four Thirds Team, Announces ƒ0.95 Lens
• Olympus 600mm Zoom-Lens is World's Tiniest
• 5 Reasons to Ditch Your Digital SLR

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.